Telecommunications has exploded over the last 20 years. New companies, technologies and services are being introduced almost faster than the consumer can take advantage of them. Nevertheless, the public's thirst for the next new thing continues to spur rapid product and service development.
Leading the charge for innovation and change is wireless telecommunications. Only a few years ago, users were content with small, lightweight cellphones that allowed them to keep in touch in urban areas, even though voice quality was less than desirable. Now, users want their wireless phones to do much more. They want service areas to have no bounds. They want digital clarity. They want distinctive ringtones and designer faceplates. But, most of all, they want services that expand the utility and flexibility of their wireless phones.
Just one of those services, but a quite useful one, is “alert-me,” which is broadly classified as an availability and reachability service. The motivation for alert-me arose from the frustration felt by one user (sometimes more specifically referred to as a “calling party”) trying to reach another user by telephone only to find that he is temporarily unreachable. In the wireless world, this can indicate that his wireless terminal is out of range of a base station or simply turned off and therefore unable to communicate. Alert-me allows the calling party to request that he be alerted when the party he wishes to call becomes reachable (e.g., returns to within range of a base station). Conventionally, alert-me alerts the calling party by transmitting a text message to him. Upon receiving the text message, the calling party can place his call with an expectation of being successful.
Unfortunately, two technical barriers stand in the way of a widespread adoption of “alert me.” The first is that many different and varied wireless infrastructures are in place in the world today. Any large-scale alert-me service would have to work with all of the wireless infrastructures that underlie it, which poses a substantial design, implementation and operational challenge. In fact, many wireless services that have been proposed or introduced but not offered widely suffer from the same challenge.
One significant effort underway to support the rapid development and deployment of new services is called Parlay/OSA (see, www.parlay.org). Parlay/OSA (OSA stands for “Open Systems Architecture”) aims to do for telecommunications infrastructures what MacOS, Unix, Linux, Windows and countless other sophisticated operating systems have done for computers: provide a device-independent platform and standard application programming interface (API) for applications such as one that provides an alert-me service. Like advanced operating systems for computers, Parlay provides a way for applications to register themselves securely, pass commands, parameters and data to the underlying infrastructure and retrieve status indicators and data from the infrastructure. Parlay appears to be an effective way to address the first of the two barriers noted above.
Unfortunately, the second barrier remains. Ascertaining where a wireless terminal is physically located within a wireless infrastructure or if the terminal is even reachable consumes considerable network time and bandwidth (i.e., resources). Any application or service wishing to locate a wireless terminal must generate, from the server on which it is executing, a status check on for the location of the particular terminal. That status check must traverse the underlying infrastructure and arrive eventually at the Home Location Register (HLR) corresponding to the wireless terminal in question. In the case of “alert me,” status checks are often repeatedly retransmitted (a process called “polling”) until the HLR indicates that the terminal is reachable. Only then can the calling party be alerted.
It is apparent that as the alert-me service increases in scale, the number of alert-me requests coming from the calling parties and the constant status check polling of the various HLRs will overwhelm the server and place a significant strain on the resources of the underlying wireless infrastructure. What is needed in the art is an improved alert-me management system and a method of providing an alert-me service.